During the next two decades, five mega-trends will be changing the world of retail, writes Coca-Cola boss Muhtar Kent.

Mass urbanisation

More than half the world's population now live in cities. By 2050, this figure will balloon to 70%. This monumental shift will create significant supply chain and logistical challenges for consumer goods and retail industries.

Our businesses will not only need to collaborate better with each other but also work more closely with cities as they modernise their infrastructures.

We're getting older

The global birth rate has been declining for 20 years, and we're living longer. By 2047, people over 60 will outnumber those under 15. This will mean new opportunities for some industries, as more mature consumers tend to have greater disposable income.

Along the way, we can expect more focused marketing and greater reliance on home delivery.

The middle class cometh

The world is experiencing the greatest economic shift in history as the global middle class grows by another billion people in the next 10 years.

With China and India leading the charge, more than 90% of the world's middle class will live in emerging markets by 2030, up from 50% today. While this new wealth represents a huge growth opportunity for manufacturers and retailers, it is also likely to create new resource stresses and cost pressures on some commodities.

Consumers in the driving seat

Many of the old rules and assumptions of our industries no longer apply. Consumer expectations are increasing while their tastes and preferences change at a dizzying pace. Much of this is driven by new consumer technologies. By 2013, for example, more than two billion mobile users globally will have made a purchase via their handsets. By 2020, a third of consumer purchases are expected to be made online.

Ultimately, new ways of connecting offer fresh and exciting opportunities to engage with digital consumers and improve their shopping experiences. Even so, retailers and FMCG firms will need more advanced real-time insights to better serve this dynamic, fragmented market.

One key will be to pick the right ways to interact with online consumers, manage these conversations appropriately, and make the best use of digital consumer data. Moreover, successful companies will need to enhance transparency and become more collaborative in their interactions with shoppers.

What about the planet?

Consumers today are understandably concerned about sustainability, as demands for natural resources continue to challenge supplies. By 2030, the world's population will reach 8.3 billion, boosting demand for food and energy by 50% and for fresh water by 30%. In this light, sustainability is simply smart business.

Interactive gambling—a category that encompasses sports betting, poker, casino games, slots and other such wagers placed from a home computer, interactive TV or mobile phone—makes up an increasingly important part of the global gambling market, according to data from H2 Gambling Capital, but not an evenly distributed one. The world’s biggest gambling market, the United States, remains its most divided. Betting is legal—encouraged, even, as Ol’ Blue Eyes can attest—in Las Vegas and Atlantic City; most states have government-run lotteries; and horse tracks around the country are rolling in slots revenue. But online poker remains illegal (which is not the same thing as not done). China seems to have similar qualms. And the global uptake rate is steady, but not especially fast, which suggests that gambling remains a social endeavour. Penury loves company.

In my opinion, the potential acquisitions of these social suite players by the major CRM companies represent the final nail in the coffin of social media. No more is it something separate, disconnected, cute and experimental. It has just moved to the heart of all marketing efforts and the stock price movements of Facebook will not change that. Social Media Marketing is on scale and needs to be at the heart of your marketing efforts right now.

Many entrepreneurs dream of starting their own company so they can be their own boss, call the shots, get the nicest table in the co-working space. Turns out, being in charge is a lot harder than just ordering people around and having someone fetch your lattes. To make a startup successful, you have to encourage an atmosphere of constant innovation.

We asked these upcoming entrepreneurs for their best tips on how to be a boss boss.

While the German market is still immature when it comes to social media adoption, a recent report for Dell from Trendstream showed that 70% of German businesses are using social media for business purposes and 40% for customer acquisition. At Dell, we see Germany as a key market to engage via social media. While our presence is not as big as we’d like it to be today, we are excited about the opportunity to empower our team members to listen and interact with our customers directly.

Last week I traveled to Halle, Germany to provide Social Media and Community University (SMaC U) training. We were able to train over 660 team members from across Europe on our core principles, policies and governance around social media as well as how to build long lasting and authentic relationships with our customers.

Below are 10 key learnings and observations from my trip:

Twitter lags in popularity: While the majority of team members that attended our classes had at least a Facebook, LinkedIn or Xing account, Twitter was not very popular.

Mixed privacy concerns: Prior to going to Germany, we recognized that online and offline privacy was a key concern to German team members and customers. However, the class was torn when we talked about an example where a team member tells their supervisor that a colleague was posting negatively about the supervisor on Facebook. Several attendees said the boss couldn’t do anything about the post due to privacy laws, while others felt like the supervisor had a right to talk to the employee about it. What do you think about this?

Frustration with Facebook: Echoing a Time article from April, many team members expressed frustration with the frequent privacy changes on Facebook. As a result said they are very careful about what they post and some team members even closed their accounts.

Fees can limit participation: While LinkedIn offers the majority of their site functionality for free, team members have to pay a monthly fee in order to leverage the same functionality on Xing.com, a popular professional community in Germany. Many team members said this was a barrier to participation.

Recommendations are unique: It was also interesting to find out that while Xing’s paid membership has very similar functionality to LinkedIn such as groups and Q&A, the site does not provide the opportunity to provide “recommendations.”

Language matters: German team members and customers would strongly prefer to communicate in their local language. Social media pages should be in German.

BASF is best in class for cross-platform: Headquartered in Germany, the chemical company does an excellent job using multiple platforms to reach their B2B audience. Their YouTube, Facebook, Flickr and Slideshare presence is proof that businesses can use social media to convey serious information through correctly toned content.

Ownership of content varies: Germany has very specific rules around content ownership related to social media and contests that differs from the U.S.

German team members love plants: During our tour of the office, we noticed large (3-4 feet tall) potted plants outside of most of the cubes and in team rooms. I’m told that they even have names for them.

Hasselhoff: Not only did team members confirm that David Hasselhoff was a country favorite, but they suggested using him to advertise the training program.

It’s interesting to see how social media usage varies across the world. I’ll keep you updated as I continue traveling for Global SMaC U training. Bangalore, India is next on my list for March.

Let me know if you have any recommendations for me while I’m there or additional thoughts on social media in Germany.

As the marketing power of social media grows, it no longer makes sense to treat it as an experiment. Here’s how senior leaders can harness social media to shape consumer decision making in predictable ways.

You’d think that creating a more equitable distribution of wealth would curb the urge to spend on status symbols – be they designer handbags or flat-screen TVs – as the “have-nots” try to keep up with the Jones.”

Closer ties mean lower spending

The authors also found participants were affected by social circumstances within their immediate environment. “It depends on the state of the economy. We found in times of recession, people tend to value their close family more, fitting in and social cohesion, and when times are better, people value standing out,’’ says Chandon.

If you feel overwhelmed by social media, you’re hardly the first. An avalanche of new forms of communication similarly challenged Europeans of the 17th and 18th centuries.

“In the 17th century, conversation exploded,” said Anaïs Saint-Jude, director of Stanford’s BiblioTech program. “It was an early modern version of information overload.”

The Copernican Revolution, the invention of the printing press, the exploration of the New World – all needed to be digested over time. There was a lot of catching-up to do. “It was a dynamic, troubling, messy period,” she said.

If you have ever traveled on Delta and have a customer service question, @DeltaAssist is probably the fastest way to get your answer.While some brands are still learning how to use social media, a few have already found that Twitter is an incredibly important customer relations management tool.

Shirky: I don’t know if you’ve played with news.me, have you seen this thing?

Wired: No I haven’t.

Shirky: So news.me sits on top of bit.ly, and it also sits on top of your social graph in Twitter and it just forwards you the five most popular stories among everybody you follow, not based on the number of times the link was circulated, but the number of times individual people you follow clicked on that link. It really has become my favorite piece of email of the day. I’ve tried lots of curation services and have really been wrestling with the serendipity problem in one form or another in news since the 1990s, when I did some work with Walter Bender’s group up at MIT. And this is the first thing I’ve seen that’s actually done it.

Both news.me and GitHub exemplify something really kind of profound. Github is offering a really interesting model for collaboration, that I think is going to spread outside of the hacker community and become a place where people are actually using the tool, not just to talk to each other, but to get things done.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Twitter has generated more advertising revenue from its mobile platform than from its website on many days in the last quarter, CEO Dick Costolo said Wednesday, highlighting Twitter's...

5 Tips for Social Business Adoption: How SAS Succeeded ( Internet Business Issues )

SAS Goes Viral by Accident

Graebe and SAS's development team launched the pilot, which "accidentally went viral," she says. More than 1,400 signed up to use The Hub before it went on production. "It's bringing global expertise to each individual at SAS. What's not to love about that?" Graebe says. "Within five minutes of one question being asked in Europe, answers come in from places we wouldnt have been able to access via email: Europe, Latin America, Australia."

Sherrod says that one unexpected challenge they faced in the pilot that went viral was the demand for off-network participation, which they had not architected. "The install was initially intranet only with an on-premise appliance," he says. "Based on that change, we may have compared the hosted and on premise offerings a bit closer."

Once The Hub officially launched, SAS saw continued adoption and enterprisewide success. To date, the company has more than 8,500 users onboard, which is about 67 percent of their employees worldwide.

Unlike many other businesses that struggle with adoption of enterprise collaboration platforms, SAS was successful by all measures. Here are five tips that Graebe, Lee and Sherrod say were key in promoting user adoption.

The social revolution is here. In a world where entire governments have been overthrown thanks to their citizens’ activism on Facebook, enterprises large and small are awakening to the reality that it’s no longer possible to operate in a world without social computing.

Facebook and its 750 million users have changed the way the world communicates. In fact, Facebook is eating the web. According to Nielsen Wire, 22 percent of all Internet time is social, while time spent on the rest of the web continues to decrease. And the devices people use to access the Internet has also changed radically. Between 2010 and 2011, the percentage of CIOs that allowed employee-owned tablets in their enterprises increased from 29 percent to 67 percent. In one year.

The social revolution has created a social divide. While customers live on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ and hundreds of other social networks, most companies are stuck in the past. What are their customers ‘likes’ and wants? What is the most important trending topic discussed by their customers on Twitter? Who within the company has the best knowledge about important Customer X who’s looking for a deal on new Product Y? Most companies have no clue.

The Social Enterprise is more than a catchphrase. It’s an entire philosophy based on the premise that the world moving forward looks much more like Facebook than it does like Microsoft Outlook. The social divide has created a rift between your company and how you interact with your customers. Here’s how salesforce.com will help your enterprise bridge the social divide.

Turns out GM might have been on to something. New research from marketing agency Greenlight shows 44 percent of Facebook's users say that they will "never" click on sponsored posts or display ads on Facebook.

General Motors caused a stir on Tuesday when it leaked that the company would stop running ads on Facebook due to them not being effective. GM will drop $10 million worth of ads, but it still plans to spend $30 million on marketing through Facebook. That story was poor timing for Facebook, which will have its record-breaking IPO this Friday.

For its 2011-2012 Search & Social Survey, Greenlight surveyed 500 people, including students, medical staff, accountants, lawyers, and others, to gain insight about their behavior on Facebook and their sentiments toward the company. On top of finding out 44 percent would never click on display ads, only 3 percent of respondents said they “regularly” clicked a sponsored ad; 10 percent said “often.”

Randy: I thought the three secrets were techniques for managing people more effectively. Explain to me how they help leaders build trust.

OMM: One aspect of building trust is being competent in your role as a leader, and certainly practicing the three secrets displays your competence. Specifically, the first secret, One Minute Goals, allows leaders to build trust by setting clear performance expectations. People are more apt to trust you as a leader if you’re clear with them on what you expect them to do. Unclear expectations result in miscommunication, wasted energy, and ambiguity, which ultimately leads to mistrust of the leader.

OMM: One of the easiest ways to build trust with others is to catch them doing something right! Recognizing and rewarding good work are key trust-building behaviors. When you take time to praise others, it shows that you value their contributions and you want them to succeed. If you fail to recognize the good work of your people, or even worse, hog the limelight and take credit for their work, you severely damage trust in the relationship. One Minute Praisings communicate care and concern, and when your people see that you care about them as individuals, they trust that you have good intentions toward them.

Don't read the fine print on smart-phone apps? A new service eventually could do it for you.

researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Rutgers University are finding it is possible to effectively outsource this screening task and then give consumers intuitive warnings about dubious data-access settings. The prototype system, built for Android apps for now, sends the app's description—and its associated data-access requests—to human workers through Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service.

Those remote workers read the settings and offer opinions—a process that takes them less than a minute and for which they are paid 12 cents apiece. Their opinions can then be aggregated into warnings.

Consider the "Brightest Flashlight" app, from Goldenshores Technology. This app merely creates a white screen to provide illumination, but the app's permission screen requires you to allow the app to furnish your "approximate location" to advertisers. It can also see your precise GPS position, and asks for your phone's unique identifier number.

Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.